If you’re discounting the new CW series Hellcats because it’s all about cheerleaders, I think you should reconsider. Executive producer Kevin Murphy gave me a strong sense of where he got the idea for the lesbian character of Patty "The Wedge" Wedgerman from and she sounds pretty awesome. Murphy said:

It came from the fact that we wanted everyone to be included and one of the things that I was looking at was we ended up with such a diverse cast ethnically and I was like "OK, what are we missing? OK, we don’t have that." I sort of looked through where I was going with the characters and I said "OK, I can’t do it with Savannah because that would just be more of a statement than I want to make with her upbringing and it just kind of came down to the character of Wedge, which was just kind of an interesting girl that was really comfortable in her own skin. And I thought, "Well what if I just sort of normalized it to make the character who is a lesbian isn’t all caught up about what she is and she’s really comfortable about what she is?"

Murphy said the idea spawned from his prior work on Caprica, where one of the male characters was gay.

One of the characters played by Sasha Roiz is the equivalent of of James Caan‘s character in Godfather. He’s like Sine Corleon. And he was gay. And he was also this brutal hitman who had badass knives and cool tattoos and would kick ass but he’d also go home at night to his husband that played in the symphony orchestra and they would make dinner together. There’s just something about the wonderful normalization of that. It just seems to really connect when you want something to be immersive and it made a real statement on Caprica because it was this other culture where it didn’t occur to them to have the bigotry we have in this culture. In terms of Hellcats, because there’s such this Caprica-esque sense of optimism, there’s a world where you can be a family where everyone’s part of the family.

They cast the character last, eventually picking Elena Esovolova for the role.

We found this amazing Canadian girl who just had this spirit, one produced credit and we were like “Wow, we really love her!”